Time to test one last blog editor. This time, we have one from out of left field: ScribeFire, a free blogging plug-in for Firefox. It’s potentially a v.meaty idea. See a page you wanna talk about on your blog? Just click on the ScribeFire button in the corner of the browser window and a blog editor appears in a new window pane, thusly:

Okay, weirdness already: I’ve hit “return” to get to a new line, and find that it’s done a simple linefeed instead of what might be termed a “Please start a new paragraph, Mr. Editor.” Let’s hit “Return” again and see what happens.
Nope. Same thing. That’s weird. The first line of the first paragraph was even indented like a real paragraph…though now I notice that it’s just a batch of spaces. Return
Damn. Does it expect me to tap “Return” twice to communicate a new paragraph?
Easy way to find out: this editor has both Rich Text and HTML views. Let’s just flip on over to the crunchy-wheat HTML side and see how it thinks this should be formatted.

Ooof. That’s no good. Not only is it not wrapping these paragraphs in paragraph tags, but those four spaces have been burned into the post as nonbreaking spaces. Meaning, the indent will be there even if my style sheet says “No indent, please; we’re English.”

Okay, I’m doing double-returns at the end of each graf.

(Note: I’m inserting these graphics after having finished the First Flight. I’m putting this one a couple of paragraphs “late” so that you can see how the earlier grafs got formatted before I started doubling the space between manually. Anyway, here’s what i was seeing in the editing window:)

(Back to your regularly-scheduled First Flight.)

I keep meaning to mention: command-I is intercepted by Firefox’s “Page Info” menu item. So you can’t italicize a word via a keyboard shortcut. But if you click the ital button in the editor, at least you “see” italics.

Like I was saying: I’m now doing double-returns at the end of each graf. Now will ScribeFire wrap the paragraphs with the right HTML tag?

Assuredly not.

Hmm.

Yeah, that’s a problem. In a “first flight” situation, I have no idea how these double-returns I’m inserting are going to be parsed. I assume that it’ll be handled the same way that WordPress’ online editor handles them (meaning: correctly) but I won’t know until I push the magic button.

I just wish I could easily work out how to pop stuff out of that page. For reference, I’m looking at the World’s Hardest Easy Geometry Problem. I’ve just selected that title and clicked the “Add A Link” button. You’re guessing that ScribeFire automatically chooses the URL of the page that you were viewing when you opened the editor? Nope.

Okay. I’m clicking “Cancel,” I’m selecting the address, doing a Copy, selecting the title here in the post again, and clicking the “Add A Link” button. Paste…good, ScribeFire didn’t screw it up.

Oops. The editing pane here isn’t scrolling down properly. I’m now at the bottom of the pane. It should automatically scroll up far enough to give me plenty of white space to edit in. In reality, it hasn’t even scrolled enough to display the descenders of the letters (oh, seems to be working now. But at first, the “p”’s and “y”’s were being cut off.)

Hmm. I’m having one of those moments where my thoughts begin with the phrase “It can’t be like this, can it? Because that would be idiotic.”

Specifically I mean that an embedded blog editor would almost automatically have all kinds of features for quoting and incorporating content from the original webpage I was visiting, right? Right?

In truth, I’m not seriously interested in ScribeFire as a main blog editor. But I want a good “Blog This Here Page” tool and this would seem to be just the ticket.

But I don’t see any tools like that. Hence my confusion. They have to be here; I’m just not finding them.

So let’s look for Help.

Mmmm…

mmm….

….

Can’t find any Help. Nothing more than ToolTips, anyway. Okay, here’s the “ScribeFire” logo in the toolbar. I bet this takes me to online help…

…Nope, it opens a new tab and loads in the main ScribeFire page. Maybe the little graphical dingus on the left of it is a separate button?

…Nope.

Hmm, again.

Oh! There’s a dingus on the extreme left of the top toolbar, which some certain misguided individuals think means “There’s more menu items hiding here somewhere.” I patiently explain to the ScribeFire author who isn’t here in the room with me: no, it doesn’t mean that. It’s pointing in the wrong direction, for one. You need an image thingy here that makes it clear. See, sir, I am now going to click that thingamabob because I don’t think you’re such an idiot that you didn’t include either system help or that…what was I looking for? It seems so long ago…oh, right: tools for including content from the current webpage.

Here I go, clicking the dingus.

A stacked column of buttons appears. A road trails off to W. You hear a babbling brook to the E. ?

Umm…okay, I’ll take “Page Tools” for $500, Alex.

No, that shows you Technorati stats for the page. Useless for the task at hand, which is writing a blog post.

Let’s go to “Bookmarks,” same dollar amount?

No, sorry…the answer were were looking for was “What is ‘Bookmark this page in del.icio.us’?” Here’s an intersting fact: this, too, has nothing to do with creating a blog post. Alice, you have control of the board.

How about “Settings” for $600.

An audio daily double! Alice, you are currently in the lead with $7300. You can risk as much of that as you want on your ability to predict that this menu will be the correct answer.

Uh, I’ll wager $100, Alex.

Nooooo, sorry: this, too, has nothing to do with editing blog posts. Wait, that’s not entirely true: you can do things like choose whether it uses CSS or HTML styles and other options.

Okay, let’s close out the board with “About.”

SO close! It’s a list of links to the ScribeFire RSS feeds, blog, etc., and a link for “Help”…aha!

Mmm, no, it just takes you to the main ScribeFire.com page and leaves it up to you to find its Help system.

Honest to God, I have now spent so much time searching for Help on this plug-in that I’ve forgotten what I wanted to get Help about.

(Right, right: integrating content from the webpage you were visiting before you activated ScribeFire.)

Sigh. So it’s willing to tell me to check the website for help. Which is what the airline does when it screws me at the airport. “Our main 800 number can help you.” “But you’re standing right here!“

Ohhh-kay. I’m clicking the “New users: Read This First” link. Yes, dear readers, I am now liveblogging what it’s like to read a webpage. This doesn’t bode well for me (what, I think you’re interested in this?) nor for you (what, there’s nothing else on right now on the whole Internet?) and certainly not for ScribeFire.

(Seriously. A button or a link marked “Help” that takes you right to a QuickStart guide or something. I can whiteboard you an explanation of this concept if y’like.)

Annnd the “Read This First” contains four (4) one-sentence items, explaining that the software won’t work until it’s installed and that it won’t run until you run it. Whoah…slow down, Professor Feynman!

I see a “Support Forum” link in the sidebar. I could click that. Or, I could take this Uniball Signo model UM-153 black gel pen from my pocket, ask it “Signo, how do I integrate content from the webpage into a ScribeFire-generated post?” and then sit patiently until it speaks the answer.

Don’t know which one is the smarter play. Same result, same wait, but if I ask the pen, I’ll won’t have to type anything.

Okay. I’m going to just let this go. I should mention that ScribeFire adds a new menu to the universal Firefox contextual menu and one of the items therein is “Blog this page.” I’ve just tried to activate it via a new window but ScribeFire failed to load itself. Maybe because I had another instance of SF going in this window right here?

Well, I dunno. Later on, I’ll see what happens when I try that contextual menu.

(Incidentally, when it creates new tabs, the embedded editor belongs to the window, and not to the individual tab that was open when I activated ScribeFire. I don’t know that this is the wrong answer, but this definitely disconnects ScribeFire as a “this webpage was so interesting that I had to blog about it right away” sort of tool.)

Here’s what I would expect an embedded editor to do: you activate it and you see pretty much what I’m looking at right now. Except there’s also a whole palette or menu of “this page” buttons. Click this button, and ScribeFire embeds the page’s title, which has been wired up as a hyperlink. Click another button, and whatever text you’ve highlighted on the page copied into your post formatted as a quote. In fact, if text is already highlighted when you activate ScribeFire, the quote is already in the editor.

Bonus points: a JPG thumbnail of the page. Double-bonus: a “gallery” of all of the embedded media on the page so I can “quote” an image (though, hmm, whether it’s a hotlink or a downloaded JPEG served from my own server, there’d be some ethical dilemmas, I guess…)

I mean, anything would be better than what I see here in ScribeFire now…which is nothing.

But let’s move forward. Time to post. Installing ScribeFire in my browser and configuring it for the Celestial Waste of Bandwidth was so fast and trouble-free that both tasks were successfully finished before I started talking about them. So that’s all you need to know about that. Bravo, well done.

(Not me…ScribeFire.)

Oh, right…pictures. I’ve been taking screenshots as I go here. I bet that inserting pictures into this post is punitively hard. Deep breath: let’s see how hard it is to insert an image from my local drive.

Click the “Add an Image” button. Hey, very nice. A dropdown dialog appears, inviting me to select either a local image or an image URL:

And what’s this? If I click on it, standard resize handles appear and I can scale it down proportionately. Awesome. Every editor should do it that way. I can select it and center it on the page, right?

Yup, apparently so. Good, good.

(No, bad; it means that now, I have to go back through this post and add the images I’ve been shooting. Sigh. Let me get a Fresca out of the fridge first and then I’ll be right on that…)

The bad news is that you can’t get access to the image detals without going into HTML mode. I’d like to say “please slap this little image on the left and allow text to flow around it” but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that. ScribeFire also got discombobulated pretty easily about where the images ended. I centered an image and then couldn’t type “un-centered” text anywhere underneath it until I clicked into some text that was already left-justified.

Okey-doke. Time to post. ScribeFire lets me add Wordpress categories, Technorati tags, trackback URLs…cool, the whole schmeer.

If the “Publish” button works as advertised, this will be my last chance to talk about ScribeFire “live.” Time to sum up:

I should say that this tool seems to be a man without a country.

It’s just another blog editor, in a field filled with apps that are far more than merely adequate. If ScribeFire were a standalone app, it would have lots of advantages over an embedded tool that’s dependent on the infrastructure and UI of FireFox. If it had a level of intimacy with the content of the webpage you were viewing when you brought up the tool, it’d be able to do things that no standalone editor can even touch.

As is? There’s no advantage to this. It works just fine, but not in any particularly good way that causes it to distinguish itself. I can’t really see why ScribeFire needs to exist. Unless it’s for the carnal glee of telling people “It’s a blog editor…as a plug-in!!!“

Kids, we were all once excited about the ability to make a phone call…from the car!! But eventually, we realized that the technology sucked until it also let us play Freecell.

Push the button, Frank…

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Warning: a “First Flight” is an ongoing log of my impressions and experiences during my first and VERY first launch of a new app. You are reading exactly what I’m thinking when I’m thinking it, during my first ten or twenty minutes of hands-on experience with the thing.

I do think it’s valuable to document these things. True, true: you can’t possibly reach any conclusions about the nature of an app in the first fifteen minutes. But the joys and frustrations you experience right off the bat can be illustrative.

So: DO NOT refer to this as a review; DO NOT lambaste me for judging an app based on a quick launch; DO NOT point out that if I’d bothered to check the Help menu I’d have discovered that I could have fixed everything with a Command-Option-Shift-G.

Because the proper response to such a complaint can only me my pinching your nose tightly between my index and ring fingers and then slapping my other fist down my forearm so hard that the sound effects guy dubs an old-timey car horn sound onto the soundtrack.

You Have Been Warned.

Yes, fellow Friends of Liberty…I’m testing out another editor. Blogo is obviously a far less-ambitious app than ecto or MarsEdit, but it definitely has a certain charm:

…And man alive, the image embedding works more or less precisely the way I’d like it to. Drag a file into the image well (or use a menu), it lets me resize it and lets me establish the resized version as a link to the full-fized thingy. Click a button and it’s in there. Niiiiiice.

It might be a little too flashy for its own good. I was surprised to find that the big “Edit” button at the top there opens up a drawer containing previous blog posts, and offers a chance to edit them. In this context, “Edit” would seem to say “Edit this post you’ve got in front of you right now.”

But Blogo appears to be a sterling example of minimalist UI. The text field under the editing box is for adding category tags. “Jeez, it doesn’t give me a list of previous categoried to choose from?” I groused.

Aha! But it uses del.icio.us-style tagging. I tap y-e…and it auto-completed “Yellowtext” from my previous blog posts. Niiiiiice.

Blogo has made a fabulous first impression. It looks like it was created by someone who took too many Cocoa programming classes who then had a boozy one-nighter with someone who took too many Web 2.0 design classes.

For all that, Bloggo has the trendy feature of the day: a “full screen” editing mode that leaves you looking at a single text edit box and a six-button palette and nothin’ else:

Hmm. I don’t know how this happened, but it inserted the photo at the top of the post instead of at the insert point. Maybe it’s because I deliberately used the “Place Image…” command from the “Post” menu instead of using the image well.

Let’s try it again. Same menu:

Yup, that’s a definite bug. But the good news is that they’re letting the OS do the heavy lifting. That photo was originally a .DNG file; I assume it’ll be converted to a JPEG when it’s uploaded. Let’s cross our fingers and see.

…Of course, I had to leave full-screen mode to insert that picture. And when I did, it apparently returned me to where the insert point was before I went full-screen. Had to scroll down to where I wanted the picture to go; they need to fix that.

Let’s see how well it handles one of those YouTube things:

…Hmm.

The fantastic news is that when you paste in the usual block of markup from YouTube, Blogo is smart enough to think “Ah! YouTube embed! Yes, my developer happens to live in a world in which these are a popular element in blog postings and so I will treat this as a special movie graphic.”

Good. But I don’t seem to be able to select it and center it. It seems to want to “float” to the left of the next paragraph. I would expect there to be a “center” command somewhere in the button palette or in the menus, but there’s none to be found.

I do find that if I grab it and move it to the center on my own, Blogo understands what I’m getting at. That’s very smart behavior (why doesn’t every app understand this?) but still, wish there were an explicit “center this sumbitch” command.

For that matter…how do I center text?

Can I just grab this graf and move it to the center? Let’s try that.

Nnnnope. This appears to be an app that hates centered text with a passion.

Also an app that doesn’t understand blockquotes or custom styles. Pity, that. What version is this? 1.0.1.1. Okay, hopefully there’s more stuff coming.

All in all, a great first impression. Blogo (which also needs another “g” in the name, incidentally) seems to get all of the compulsories right. It does need to acquire a few basic features.

(Seriously, dude: no centering?)

And oddly enough, if the right UI designer were to take this exact same window and this exact same collection of buttons, and just slid them around into a different configuration — and made the buttons prettier, & junk — it’d be one of those simple things that makes the app stronger.

There also appear to be a handful of subtle bugs. It keeps adding a bare line under a certain image in this post. And even though the YouTube video appears to be centered here in the editing window, it’s right-justified in the preview.

Oh, did I not mention the preview mode? It previews the blog post as it will appear in your current blog template. Viz:

AWE-some.

Of course, the ideal is probably for a blogging app to be so reliable that you’d never need to preview something before posting. But it’s a nice feature anyway.

I’m adding Blogo to the rotation of blogging tools. I think the most effective way to determine a winner is to keep all three (four…five) in the Dock and find out which one I gravitate to.

Manually edited to comment about how well the posting landed on the blog:

Hmm. Give it a C instead of an “A.” Blogo did not, convert the .DNG image. In fact, the presence of that image caused Blogo to fail to post this at all. Seems like it’d be a simple thing for Blogo to check on its own; wonder why it doesn’t?

Secondly, it didn’t actually center anything properly. Bad, bad, bad. It looked OK in the preview but the preview didn’t match reality…thus rendering the whole preview mode less than useful.

And dangit, when you click on the pictures it just opens the same 400-pixel wide image in a new window. I thought the UI made it clear that these things would be linked to full-sized images. So it’s either a UI failure or it’s an application failure.

Finally, the code it generated is a bloody mess. It might parse fine, but I think these apps should generate clean code that’s easy for a human to read and edit if need be.

Heartbreaking. My enthusiasm for Blogo has dropped way down. If you click “Post” and part of you is certain that you’re going to have to go back in and fix something…that sort of removes Blogo from consideration as a “real” day-to-day blogging tool. Hopefully it’s a simple case of 1.0-itis that’ll be fixed as the app matures.

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Warning: a “First Flight” is an ongoing log of my impressions and experiences during my first and VERY first launch of a new app. You are reading exactly what I’m thinking when I’m thinking it, during my first ten or twenty minutes of hands-on experience with the thing.

I do think it’s valuable to document these things. True, true: you can’t possibly reach any conclusions about the nature of an app in the first fifteen minutes. But the joys and frustrations you experience right off the bat can be illustrative.

So: DO NOT refer to this as a review; DO NOT lambaste me for judging an app based on a quick launch; DO NOT point out that if I’d bothered to check the Help menu I’d have discovered that I could have fixed everything with a Command-Option-Shift-G.

Because the proper response to such a complaint can only me my pinching your nose tightly between my index and ring fingers and then slapping my other fist down my forearm so hard that the sound effects guy dubs an old-timey car horn sound onto the soundtrack.

You Have Been Warned.

Time to play with OmniGroup’s new OmniFocus task-management app. I’ve seen this in beta and was v.impressed with its approach and its goals. And I use OmniOutliner to run a fairish percentage of my life, so my expectations are high.

Macworld Expo also gave me the chance to get a 45-minute personal runthrough from the app’s designer, who was nice enough to work through all of my questions. I was certainly left thinking that this is could be a terrific product. I’ve never used a personal organizer or a project manager; they all seem to want me to run my life the way that programmers run theirs.

To this I respond: have you seen the way most programmers run their lives? Case closed.

The other problem is that acolytes of the “Getting Things Done” model of organization have been becoming increasingly PeTA-ish in how obsessively and annoyingly they pursue their Missions. Dine out with a GTD’er and you’ll have to walk to his side of the table and get your own damned salt. Because if you ask him to pass it to you, he’ll be lost in thought as he tries to work out how to contextualize that into an actionable result.

So that was my main worry as I read the product page; “GTD” is indeed spotted here and there. But they don’t seem to be all “blow up a research lab in the interests of protecting living things”-ish about it, so it’s all good.

Onward.

Launches with some helpful action items already in there. “Getting Started With OmniFocus” and (uh-oh) “Learn More about Getting Things Done” are my existing projects, evidently.

Merlin Mann gets a free bookmark? Why isn’t OmniGroup sending free traffic my way? Sure, I have nothing to do with this product or its goals, but still.

A summons for jury duty arrived while I was away. I need to fill out the little card and mail it in.

Tap command-N to create a new action item…it creates a new window, not a new item or a new project. Bad call. Am I going to spend more time in this app creating windows, or creating to-dos and goals? Exactly.

Ugh, it isn’t even command-SHIFT-N…that’s for creating new projects. It’s command-CONTROL. This is going to be a hassle. I remember from the demo that there are many ways to add actions; hopefully there’s something better in there.

Okay: command-CONTROL-N. Wait…that creates a new item in “Learn About Getting Things Done.” Well, that makes sense; I had that item open.

Err…okay, how about I drag it into the Inbox? Yup, that worked.

Hmm. I wish this window had column headers. I can get by context that the first field is the description, the next are Project and Context and other icons. But glancing to the top of the window and seeing it explicitly spelled out is reassuring.

“Mail in card for jury duty.” Tab.

Er…is this really a project?

Here’s where I usually fail at these apps. I like OmniOutliner because I can just build lists and check them off, free-form. But I appreciate that an app like OmniFocus can help me handle things that are much more complex.

Still, I’d love to have one single “dashboard” for everything I’d like to do, large and small. Let’s make this project “Snail Mail.” Type. Enter. It disappears.

Type, hit tab? Disappears.

Okay, I know this is a bit of a ringer. As I type, a little cue drops down from the field: “New Project: Command-Return.” No mistaking that. Still, I wish I knew why the keys that seem to work in every other app aren’t the ones I can use here. The Omni guys build great stuff and there’s prolly a reason. One that makes sense to them, anyway.

Now there’s a field for “Context.” Deep breath. This is the heavy-voodoo bit of this. I admit that “context” just makes no readily-apparent sense. You really do need someone to explain a philosophy behind it.

Off the top of your head, what’s the “context” of mailing a jury-duty form? Is it a piece of mail? Is it something you do because you don’t want to get arrested?

Context? I suppose I’ll be sitting at my kitchen table while I do this. Should I write “Just after lunchtime, when I’m not quite ready to go back to work and am looking for an excuse to get out of the house?

Here’s why my Macworld demo was valuable. I asked for a real bonehead explanation of what I’d use this for and Captain OmniFocus said that his own personal definition is “the one thing, person, environment, whatever that I absolutely need in order to make this this happen.”

I think about it for a few moments. “Post Office,” I guess. “Mailbox” seems stupid and pedantic, as does “stamps.” I’m trying to think of this as something that would be useful to me later. If “Post Office” is the context, then it can also be applied to things like buying stamps, picking up mail on hold, paying the annual rent on my PO box, that sort of stuff.

“Post Office”…done.

Hey, maybe Snail Mail is indeed a good Project. Just remembered that I need to mail off two copies of my new book to some contest winners.

Command-N…NO! Control-Shift-N. (I hope I get used to this)

Hmm…nothing happened. The title of “Inbox” highlighted but that’s it.

Wait…Control-Shift-N is now simply selecting Actions every time I hit it?

Ohhh…according to the File menu, it’s Control-Command-N. My fault. But dammit, these things happen when you make me learn a new command instead of allowing to use the old command that seems like the best, most obvious choice.

(Sigh.) Nope, still does nothing. Wait, now it does. Did I screw it up again, or is it context-sensitive? I bet I screwed it up. But (hate to keep harping on this, but I must) if it were Command-N as it should have been, I wouldn’t keep messing up.

Cool. Auto-complete on both Project and Context.

Still feels a little weird to refer to post-office stuff as a Project. Seems a bit like referring to American Pie 5 as Cinema.

Need to finish up a list of products I’ll be including in a Consumers Digest feature. That one has a deadline…and it’s a very natural project-ish sort of thing.

“Finish product universe,” project is “Consumer Digest,” context is…

Hmm.

I suppose I’ll need my Mac for this? “Mac.”

Open Inspector, add “today” as due date. Item immediately turns red. Crap, I’ve only been using this app for ten minutes and already deadlines are turning red on me.

Date and time appear as a popup calendar and time bar. I wonder if there are shortcuts for “Today” and “Tomorrow”? Seems like those would be handy. One ongoing annoyance of these kinds of apps is that something isn’t necessarily due at a certain time or even a certain day. I wish this app would let me say “Next week” and understand this as “Doesn’t really matter when, but if it isn’t finished by Friday morning, it’ll become urgent.”

I also feel weird tapping in “Midnight” when (again) the actual time doesn’t really matter.

Let’s try something with Attachments, which impressed me in last week’s briefing. I’m planning on a blog post about the ModBook and Paul Lee, a comic artist I met at the booth.

“ModBook blog post”; Project: okay, “CWOB”; Context? Umm…”Blog,” I guess. Can’t blog without the blog though I can’t help but think I’m making an error by choosing a Project and a Context that are damned near identical.

Again confusion about Contexts. “Where” is this action item? “What” do I need to do it? It could be almost anything, which in one sense gives me a lot of power to organize my world as I see fit, but in another sense gives me a slight blip of confusion every time I create something. Worst-case is that I simply leave this blank for most things.

Writing this blog post will involve pasting up a bunch of questions that Paul answered via email, and some digital art that he’ll be sending me when he has a chance.

Click on the “Attachments” icon, drag in a drawing he sent me over the weekend. Cool; shows up right under the action, indented slightly. Wish it were a thumbnail instead of a generic JPG icon. But good news: it supports QuickLook so I can check it out without opening it in Preview. Cool.

Drag in an email message. It appears as a link to the original message in Mail (good) but it appears on the same line as the JPEG icon (not good). Drag in the remaining two…same deal. If I want each one on a different line, I have to insert the line breaks myself. Seems like “put each attachment on a new line” (or some other thing that makes it easy to separate multiple attachments) would make sense.

Another situation where I wish I could deadline this as “This week, sometime.” Instead I lie and say that it has an actual deadline of midnight on Friday.

Recurring actions. I want to remind myself to spend at least half an hour cleaning my office every day. Action: “Clean office”; Project: “Maintenance”; Context: …

“Office”? Okay, nobody’s watching: “Office.”

Inspector: Repeat Every (1) Days. Bang.

Good. From my briefing last week I know that OmniFocus will create a brand-new Action with this information every single day. I should also create one for my Sun-Times deadline; he explained that every repeating action is in fact its own thing, which means that I can add individual details for each specific column.

Dangit, I need to select “Inbox.” I accidentally created it as an item in the project that was already open. I don’t know if I like that; instinctively I think “create a new action” should but a push-and-go thing; I shouldn’t have to think about where I am in the app, or navigate to a different place.

Select “Inbox.”

“Sun-Times Column”; Project: “Sun-Times”; Context…

“My genius”?

“Mac,” I guess. Sigh. It’ll take me a while to get used to this. I don’t know if I can rightly blame OmniFocus, though. I’ve never used this style of app before.

Add data for the recurring action. Simple. But I made the mistake of clicking on some of the other tabs in the Inspector:

Now I’m confused. Look at all those…things. I think I remember some of those from the demo.

I’m starting to wonder if I’m not being presented with way too many options here. Okay, so this “every week” thing isn’t limited to just actions; it can also be a whole project. So it might make sense to make “Write a Sun-Times column” a weekly project, with a batch of action items for each column (”Talk to Steve about where he got the idea for MacBook Air”, “Doctor up some phony pictures of the ‘Mac Air Nano’”…that sort of thing).

But would I really want that application sidebar to contain fifty-two Sun-Times projects every year?

No, what happens is that it disappears when completed. So only columns-in-progress would be there.

Okay…but when I add a new Action, would it be more complicated to figure out which week’s column it should apply to?

Overthinking things, Andy. Let’s just make a recurring Project.

(But will the new Projects be created on a weekly basis, or as I need them?)

Le Sigh.

I’ll return to this line of thought later. For now, I have plenty of actions and the window is now full of Projects in that sidebar. So now if I want to see all of the CWOB-related actions, I just click “CWOB” and…

Wait…where the hell are my actions? I only see one of them:

That’s the one that’s “due” by the end of the week. Where’s the other idea I had? The one with no deadline?

Click on “Snail Mail”…no actions.

Click on “Maintenance”…no actions.

What the hell?

Let’s do a search. Search for “universe” — I know that one of the actions was about a “project universe”…

No hits?!?

Click on “Inbox.” Okay, I have one item for “Finish Project Universe.” But why (the hell) didn’t it show up in a search? Why didn’t it show up when I clicked on the project title?

UGH. Okay, here’s what happened: it’s not a global search. It only searches the one thing you’ve selected. Which has a two-pronged bad effect: it doesn’t immediately understand a “find every action that matches this” request unless you think to somehow select your whole universe first, and secondly, if you forget that the search box has the word “universe” in it, when you click on other projects they’ll all appear to be empty.

Is that why I didn’t see any of my other actions?

Nope. All projects are still empty. Again I ask: what the hell?

Okay, I see most of these things when I click on the Inbox. And more clicking reveals that if I click on “no target in particular” in the sidebar, it seems to mean “show me everything”:

…But there are still empty projects which I know contain actions.

Do I have to manually drag actions out of the Inbox and into their related projects? I just assumed that defining a project when creating the Action would cause OmniFocus to do that sort of thing automatically.

Maybe I’ve made a poor assumption. I just assumed that the point of defining Projects and Contexts meant that I could do a one-click swivel search. “Show me everything in the ‘CWOB’ project” “Show me everything to do with the post office.”

Dangit. It looked so bloody simple in the live demo. It looks like I’m just going to have to sit down with the manual and read it. I did understand it when someone with lots of experience was showing the app off.

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